Grammar and Its Terminology

111.-GRAMMAR AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. By LEONARDC. WIIARTON,N.A. [Read at the Meeting ofthe Philological Society on Friday, 6th November, 1925.1 THEREis no escape from the necessity of trying to clear our minds of the confusions that have clung to this subject by essaying a new way of approach, and this is the only justification of the paper now submitted to the Society. All my attempts to follow the lead of the English Association’s pamphlet which occasioned the discussion out of which the rash promise to write a paper arose failed ; this was because the order and the treatment were quite illogical and intractable. We must learn from that experienced labourer at Delphi, who told the head of the American School excavations that you must always go & mktxo, get to the bedrock. Well then, what is grammar, our subject matter ? For if we are to deliver judgment on the teaching of grammar, me must know not only what is grammar, but also what grammar is, and the last is the more important for us to examine. ’ The writer or an article sent in recently by a Press cutting agency said of a language under discussion that it was “ full of grammar ”. Another said the same of a certain book, while an Indian pundit quoted the ascription of the title of founder of grammar to the God Indra. Now this sort of thing-and, with it, nine-tenths of our discussions on the grammar question-arises from confusion, and some of the worst specimens can be found in the English Association’s pamphlet. In fact, at least two meanings exist, and I set them out here in an order which is not necessarily logical, but at least dis- tinguishes them. (i) Here grammar is the formal statement of the rules observed in any given language and of any forms existing in it. (It should be understoodthat both these definitions, (i)and (ii), apply equally well to groups of languages or, if it be possible, universal grammar. (ii) Grammar here is the framework in which it is thought that a certain people thinks and speaks. 44 GRAMMAR AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. A third sense should be noted, namely the concrete book in which the formal statement, etc., is set out in systematic order. If one says “ give me your grammar ”, one does not expect to be answered by the recitation of the alphabet, the parts of speech, etc., but by the handing over of a certain volume .belonging to a certain individual. In a certain sense, No. (ii) becomes No. (i), when reduced to writing, and therefore tlie material of No. (iii). But our troubles largely arise because either may be treated as ideals to be pursued and enforced. This is bow such phrases as “ That’s bad grammar ” come in. It may be due to the idea of No. (ii), but is certainly very often coloured by the feeling that we have a duty in the matter, that is, to stick to a certain framework and eschew all variations. The Eton Latila Grammar (which is really a re-hash of Idly’s Latin Grammar composed for the much more ancient school of St. Paul’s), the Eton Italian Grammar are obviously number (i) in the form (iii), but mnch of our trouble about teaching grammar would vanish if people distinguished Nos. (i) and (ii) and defined their attitude to both. Historically we owe our grammar and the theories about it to the Greeks. Before a detailed discusdion of this, please note that, as shown above, though I am aware of the very high claims of Indian grammar to antiquity, I do not see how the method of the Pundit, whose article I deliberately leave anonymous, can be justified. He speaks of the Greeks as the Alexandrian School, presumably meaning John Philoponus, Didymus, etc., and then triumphantly cites the voluminous literature quoted by Panini and that stated to have perished before him. After all, Aristotle systematized Greek grammar, including some existing Platonic material, and the Sophists lectured on grammar before the birth of Socrates, so the claim to priority of post-Vedic Sanskrit grammar must be treated with caution. To return to my theme, the Greeks who used the Hellenic tongue show themselves in the fifth century literature much more conscious of close contact with people in Greece (geographically speaking) who did not speak HelIenic than our pastors and masters were wont to acknowledge. Thucydides was half a barbarian ; GRAMMAR AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. 45 Herodotus came from that Pnrian city that later gave US that great liternry critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Both give US an amazing picture of the co-existence of the older and newer cultures and languages in the narrow bounds of the easternmost peninsula but one in the northern Mediterranean, not to say in Magna Grmia and the coasts of ssia and the islands. The same condition has lasted right through Greek history to the present day. What we see in the way of grammars and dictionaries published in partibus injidelium as patriotic propaganda for Philhellenism at the time of Coraes and the zeal for the study of the language in the narrowest detail prepares us for the exercise of the memory. This will show that, among other things done by the Sophists, for which they were trounced by their rival, Plato, was that they got people discussing the meaning and use of words, the arrangement of words in a sentence, the balancing of clauses, etc. Now all this, I submit, is grammar, and no less so because it is also an essential part-as to some of these things- of the art of rhetoric. Gorgias certainly taught people certain rhythms, certain uses of balancing clauses, etc., which rest on and are applied grammar. It is no surprise to find that he is of Tarentum and that others came from similar places. The insistent recurrence of the phrase pappapd&Jvos elsewhere, the copious introduction of what purports to be Scythian, etc., in the Aristo- phanic comedy (is Stage French always intelligible to a French- man or a French scholar ?) all point the same way that a very early approach to grammatical studies was made in Greece under the stimulus of the necessity to keep the tongue pure and the additional, if unacknowledged, one of the example of the greater Asiatic cultures. A princess kept a school at Ur of the Chaldees (though it is true this was a school of domestic economy to a large extent and of late date) and other evidences of teaching are of very high antiquity-and that teaching on a grammatical basis. From their exclusionist standpoint the Greeks were bound to try to analyse the process of thought and that of expression- written or other-in their own language, and Aristotle reduced the products of this work to order in his books on logic and rhetoric. But he did not intend them for a grammar in our first sense, 48 GRAMMAR AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. grammar No. (ii) only entering in as a secondary factor in the rhetorical worlis and in the logical ones occasionally. The systematizers of grammar, however, quarried in Aristotle and the spurious Aristotelean works and elsewhere and produced what is typified by the names of Dionysius Thrax (note the epithet !) and Donatus. But from the beginning of the new period in education marked by Aristotle’s name logic, rhetoric, and grammar mere taught together and always linked with literature as well as with each other. As a result of historical causes well known to you, our terminology is substantially the Latin terminology of grammar. This was a Roman debasement of the Greek rules of the three arts confused together and misapplied. (The much-lauded Roman law is itself little more than a debased Greek public law eked out by not always intelligently applied Greek philosophy and a certain amount of the Roman lex tulionis, combined with some native Italian wit.) An instance is the word accusative. Well in Latin you do my accusare quemquam (though you earn more marks for Ciceronianism by saying reum facere !), but in Greek you 9ay ~arqyop~iirTLVOS, i.e. with the Greek genitive of the object. Here again ~~KELV,which actually takes the accusative, is the correct Attic usage, but not the one which led the grammarians. They were thinking of the profitable matter contained in the Aristotelean “ Analytics ” and of the Categories in particular. Hence the case represented in Latin by accusativus is in the original derived from a verb (or noun) whose object was in the genitive. Obviously the term for the ablative, non-existent in Greek, was invented by the Romans, and is a well-chosen name for part of the functions of that case. Books have been written on the moods and tenses, mostly trying to harmonize the violently diverse spirit of tLe Greek and Latin grammarians’ treatment of the verbs. Here neither is to be congratulated, for the essential facts are quite obscured, and the analogies to the Slavonic verb are only now beginning to be recognized. Now the inheritance does not fit our present stage of language in England : still less in Tahiti, Fiji-or Ido ! What we want is 8 fresh analysis of the process of thought and of speech, but for GRAMMAR AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. 47 uninflected as well as for all degrees of inflected languages, aided by that advantage which we moderns have over the wilful monoglottism of the ancients. (Please note that.1 am not saying that uninflected languages really exist.) What do we do when we think 1 What do we do when we speak ? (I wish to state here that I conceive this to be the true logical order.

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